The Dog Star

By

Scott Eyman

October 1, 2011

This is what the legend says: On Sept. 15, 1918, while strolling around an abandoned German encampment in France, Lee Duncan, a gunnery sergeant in the 135th Aero Squadron, found a kennel littered with dead dogs. There was only one sign of life—a frantic female German Shepherd struggling with a litter of five puppies. Duncan saved them all. He gave the mother to a friend, gave away three puppies and kept the prettiest two, a male and a female, for himself. He named them Rin Tin Tin and Nanette, after a pair of dolls that were considered good luck charms in France.

One of the first stills reproduced in "Rin Tin Tin," Susan Orlean's deeply moving biography of a dog and the man who loved him, is a shot of Lee Duncan in his doughboy's uniform. In his lap is a black, four-legged bolt of trouble who looks to be about eight weeks old. The dog is alert and ready for action. Duncan, by all reports a normally a taciturn man burdened by life, wears an ear-to-ear grin.

Ms. Orlean, a staff writer for the New Yorker, explores "the life and the legend" of Rin Tin Tin and perceptively illuminates both. It's a pleasure to report that the legend is also the truth and to be reminded of just how remarkable a dog Rin Tin Tin really was.

ENLARGE

'Rinty' in 1925, the year he made 'Clash of the Wolves,' which Susan Orlean calls his 'most memorable' film.
Getty Images

Rin Tin Tin

By Susan Orlean Simon & Schuster, 324 pages, $26.99

It's not strictly accurate to say that Rin Tin Tin created the role of the heroic dog in the movies. Before him both the Vitagraph and Keystone studios had canine stars—Jean and Teddy, respectively—who appeared in ¬silents. There was even a German Shepherd named Strongheart whose movies predated Rin Tin Tin's. But none of those dogs had Rin Tin Tin's staying power, because none of them had his combination of size, volatility and—there's no other word for it—charisma. This dog was every bit as prodigiously graceful an action hero as Douglas Fairbanks. In one film, he darts up a tree. Dogs can't do that; Rin Tin Tin could.

Duncan had grown up in California, and soon after he returned from the war with his dog, he entered him in a dog show at Los Angeles's Ambassador Hotel, where Rin Tin Tin was caught on film clearing a 12-foot wall. Something about the experience convinced his owner that the dog was destined for Hollywood.

Beginning with 1923's "Where the North Begins," Rin Tin Tin starred in more than a dozen films for Warner Bros. The profits from his films enabled Warner Bros. to indulge in the sophisticated but largely uncommercial films of Ernst Lubitsch. Though the studio let Rin Tin Tin go after talkies came in, he made a few more films for smaller companies until his death, at age 14, in 1932.

Many of the Rin Tin Tin silents have been lost through deterioration of the nitrate originals and the ravages of time—storage fires and so on. Six survive, and several are available on DVD; I recommend "Clash of the Wolves" and "The Night Cry." Even now, nearly 90 years after the films were made, Rin Tin Tin compels attention.

Put simply, the dog could act. In "The Night Cry," he's accused of killing sheep. Driving off the real culprit, a giant condor, Rin Tin Tin is wounded but manages to find his way home. But his owner still thinks he's a sheep killer, and the dog realizes that the world is still out of joint, despite his best efforts at putting things right. Ms. Orlean describes the moment: "As Rin Tin Tin approaches his master in a broken and broken-hearted shuffle, you can see him working through his own set of dissonant feelings—love of his owner, his need for help, the confusion over a rejection he doesn't understand, and, ¬finally, defeat." German Shepherds are unusually intelligent—if you have to show a Shepherd something more than twice, you, not the dog, are doing something wrong—and you can invariably see Rin Tin Tin contemplating his options, then reacting.

Rin Tin Tin was black, lean and rather small—Duncan said he was 85 pounds, but that's probably a slight exaggeration. He was not a typical German Shepherd of our time but a typical German Shepherd of his time, as much wolf as dog. From our point of view, then, he's a throwback, which accounts for the slight sense of danger he brought to his scenes.

Lee Duncan had been given up for adoption when he was 6, and he tended to be remote with other people. He came completely alive only with his dogs—actually, with one dog. So Ms. Orlean's book is about a transcendent love affair, which is perhaps why it loses some momentum in its second half, as her story moves past the original dog to his descendants, both literal and cinematic. After Rin Tin Tin died in 1932, Lee Duncan spent the rest of his life—he died in 1960—breeding German Shepherds, in the vain hope of lightning striking twice.

It didn't happen—the dog in the successful 1950s TV series was trained by someone else, because Duncan's new dog wasn't smart enough. Still, Rin Tin Tin's legendary aura survived, spawning the gentler, more domesticated Lassie, among other imitators. Ms. Orlean clearly sees Rin Tin Tin as root stock for the modern concept of the dog as a sentient being worthy of all the trust and devotion given to any other family member—maybe more.

Writers for the New Yorker have a way of being dispassionate chroniclers of other people's obsessions. A patronizing attitude can seep through, but Ms. Orlean goes deeper than that. In her book "The Orchid Thief," for instance, there's a sense of there-but-for-fortune about her attitude toward the freaks and geeks of the flower trade. Here Ms. Orlean admits that her obsessive quest for the truth about a single dog derives from her own thwarted childhood desire to own a German Shepherd.

In attempting to describe the hold the dog had on Lee Duncan—and has on her—Ms. Orlean dispenses with the pretense of objectivity: "What lasts? What lingers? What leaves just a little dent in the world, the soft sunken green grave, the scribble on a scrap of paper, the memory that is bleached by time and then vanishes bit by bit each day?. . . For as long as I can remember those questions have shaken me."

Perhaps, like Lee Duncan, Ms. Orlean simply doesn't want to let go of the connection she made with one special animal, once upon a time. What we're really interested in ends when Rin Tin Tin dies and is buried back in France, a chain of events Ms. Orlean can't quite untangle. (She visits the dog's grave but can't explain how he got there, although the most likely scenario is that Lee Duncan simply thought that the story should end where it began—in France.)

But that's one of the few things at which Ms. Orlean fails. This is an unforgettable book about the mutual devotion between one man and one dog. As for the sense of loss that permeates her book, there's only one cure: She needs to get a German Shepherd.

—Mr. Eyman is the author of "Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille."

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